The formal process for handling a design change once a project is underway: proposing it, assessing its impact on cost, schedule, and other disciplines, getting it formally approved, and making sure everyone working from the model actually knows it happened. Without disciplined Change Management, a "small" change made by one team can silently break another team's coordinated work, since nothing forced the change to be reviewed or communicated before it landed in the shared model.

A well-run CDE supports change management directly: moving a changed element through WIP to Shared is itself a form of controlled, visible change, rather than an edit that just quietly appears in someone else's next model sync.